Last edited Sat Apr 6, 2019, 05:58 PM - Edit history (1)
I could tell hundreds of stories about him. I met him during his career, but got to know him better after he retired. He used to point out that he was the "most senior junior Senator in history" (since Strom Thurmond was the other SC Senator). He said that if he ever noted that in Strom's presence the old fart would say, "Get used to it Fritz."
Unlike Thurmond, Hollings didn't change parties to survive the conversion of the South to a all-Republican enclave that began in the 1960s.
I heard him recount the moment his outlook on racial politics changed.
Keep in mind that he was born in the 1920s, when ex-Confederate soldiers were still alive and SC was a poverty-ridden wasteland trying to cope as an agricultural economy in a rapidly industrializing nation. He served in WW2 and was deeply moved by the stories of the Nazi atrocities in Europe. Near the end of the war, he was back home in SC and went to lunch in an area that hosted a large German POW camp. Two trucks pulled up carrying several dozen German prisoners (they worked during the day similar to chain gangs clearing brush and doing other manual labor on roads), supervised by a couple of white and several black US soldiers. The white soldiers brought the POWs in and sat them in a section of the restaurant. He could see that the black American soldiers had, as was the mandatory custom of the times, gone around to the back window to order their lunch. They would eat at picnic tables behind the restaurant since they were not allowed to sit or even enter the restaurant.
Hollings said he sat there absorbing the sight and trying to reconcile how these enemy soldiers - who had served in a foreign army with the express desire to kill American soldiers and, if possible, destroy the United States and the European democracies - were allowed because of their white skin to eat with US citizens while the black soldiers who were serving their country and willing to fight and die for it were not even permitted to walk through the front door. He said he saw the absurdity and moral bankruptcy of the Southern racial perspective in a way that he never had before, and that the experience had a profound impact on the rest of his life and his political career.
A great man who, while flawed and very much a product of his times, was a major player in bringing his State and nation closer to racial equity and harmony in the post-World War era.
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